Entrepreneur's Wealth

Here it is! My new blog design is up and running! What do you think of it?

Although not completely unique, I think this design is just as clean as my previous design, but adds a little more color and flare. Please leave a comment here and let me know what you think, I’d love to hear your honest opinions.

Theme Creation
So as I said above, the theme isn’t completely unique. It’s actually based off of the Hemingway 4u theme at UtomBox. When I downloaded the theme, I knew that I didn’t want to use it completely stock because I wanted something that stands out a bit and isn’t an exact copy of anybody else. So what I ended up doing was doing a few tweaks throughout the stylesheet to add color here and there. I then created a logo as you can see, just something simple to dress up the header. Lastly I wigetized the theme’s right column and made it wider to accommodate more information.

I also ended up tweaking how the single post and archive pages look. In the stock theme, it removes the right column and makes a little information box to the left of the actual post to tell you about the post. I found this to be kind of useless and wanted my right column bar to always be shown no matter what page you were on.

Why I Went With a Free Theme
I first started to look into buying a theme, but quickly realized that I wasn’t ready to spend $600+ on a theme. To be honest, there are hundreds of great themes out there that can be customized to a semi-unique look at a fraction of the cost (or free, if you have the skills for it). So with my decision to move forward with a free theme, I started to customize the Hemingway 4-u theme and it went quite quickly.

Why This Theme is Better
There are quite a few reasons that I feel this theme is better than my previous. First this theme has a much bolder color scheme. The colors are crisp and just pop as soon as you look at it. My previous theme, although just as clean and simple as this one, seemed washed out and boring at times. It was time for a change in my mind.

Secondly, this theme has allowed me to add in a bit of personal branding by incorporating a logo and favicon into the blog. I’m not graphic artist, but I did my best in creating something simple, yet iconic and I hope that’s what I’ve accomplished.

I’ve also been able to incorporate commenter avatars into this design which is something I’ve always liked on other blogs. I think it’s nice to see the MyBlogLog avatar of the commenter next to their comments…..adds a bit of personality and breaks up the monotony of the comment text.

Lastly, I was able to incorporate a sponsors section where I can have up to 4 advertisers, each with a standard 125×125 spot. With my RSS subscriber rate growing alongside my traffic I think now is the time to start monetizing, but I certainly don’t plan to overdo it.

Advertising
Since I’m on the topic of advertising, I would like to offer the 4 advertising slots that I have open at a price of just $10 for the remainder of November. Below are some the stats for this blog:

If you have any questions regarding the advertising or would like to purchase one of the 4 slots please contact me and I will get back to you with paypal information.

I think that about covers all of the information regarding my new theme. I really hope that you like it. Everyone that I’ve shown it to so far has said good things and thinks it’s a step up from my old design. Please leave me some feedback, I’d love to hear from everyone.

Another thumbs up here for the design, Erik. The colour scheme is very nice.

One thing I would recommend is darken the blog post text. Even with my good vision, I was having to adjust my focus to be able to read the text. The font colour of the comments is much better, in my opinion.

Hey Erik, great improvements! Glad to see the new look! One thing I would suggest is to give the navigation buttons a little more of a prominent mouseover. I can see the text darken slightly, but it’d be nice to see the whole button light up or something. Otherwise it’s a great new layout!

Wow, what a nice design. I guess we have some familiarity with a red/white complexion theme. The only difference is that you have a black header on top of your blog and you have a footer which I am looking forward to in my new theme in the future.

I guessed I just got myself a competitor in offering ad space. Your prices is way lower than mine but your RSS subscribers are more than mine… Busted!

Matt – Thanks for the comments and faith in the blog and congrats on your recent sale!

Wayne – I appreciate the comments. Don’t think of us as competitors I’m not trying to make a fortune off the blog right now, so $10 for a month of ad space sounds reasonable to me. Best of luck with your new theme and ad space